budget

There’s another spending fight coming. Trump says he won’t sign another flaming pile of garbage like this. After the reaction he got the other day, it’s likely he’ll keep his word. He should demand that he receive the next bill in final form 30 days before the deadline – no more 30 minutes to read 2,200 pages nonsense. This will give real conservative leaders a chance to disinfect it with sunlight, like Senator Rand Paul did highlighting the flotsam and jetsam in the last one.

The omnibus spending bill to avert a government shutdown Friday won bipartisan support from congressional leaders and backlash from House conservatives heading toward a vote later today in the lower chamber. The spending bill is 2,232 pages long and comes with a price tag of $1.3 trillion, and got White House backing despite not including anywhere near the $25 billion President Trump sought for a border wall -- and a stipulation that the money can't be used for that wall.

Republicans are spending again like drunken sailors. It isn't hard to appreciate why a libertarian-leaning senator like Paul would launch a filibuster against a spending bill negotiated by his own party's leader. So, next time Republicans complain about "big government" eroding individual liberty, the free market, and civil society, we have to remind them, “You bought it.”

The 1,665-page spending bill the Republican-controlled Congress is planning to pass this week includes multiple measures that seemingly demonstrate a commitment to securing the border — in Libya, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. But thanks to the deal that Republican and Democratic leaders made in Congress, it will not go to fund the border wall President Trump vowed to voters he would build if he were elected.

President Trump is truly a man alone. This isn’t new, as he was elected for that very reason; he campaigned as someone who would confront the status quo, and by doing so, make America great again. The budget battle is the perfect illustration of how lost Congress is and confirms the importance of why Mr. Trump was elected: to stop the nonsense in Washington that is ruining our lives. He is the right president, but the Republican Party is not his team.

We urge our conservative friends and readers to call their Representatives and Senators (the Capitol switchboard is 1-866-220-0044) to demand funding of the border wall in the soon-to-be-passed continuing resolution. Tell them no excuses; no border wall funding – means a no vote.

For much of the Washington news media, cutting federal funding for something is the same as opposing that thing. Trump's budget, however, makes a distinction that these critics miss. Federal funding should be for things that are best done by the federal government. Many things are better done at a level of government closer to the individual, or even outside government altogether.

The pressure from Capitol Hill’s big spending establishment Republicans won’t be to cut the budget, it will be to fund the increased spending on defense and homeland security AND all the domestic boondoggles that President Trump wants to eliminate to pay for his shift in priorities.

President Donald Trump will ask Congress to cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget 24 percent, or nearly $2 billion, according to sources familiar with the budget plans. The White House sent draft budget plans to agency heads Monday, detailing billions of dollars in cuts to a wide range of federal programs. Cuts to EPA and other agencies will fund a $54 billion increase in defense spending.

We urge CHQ readers to call Congress (the Capitol Switchboard is 1-866-220-0044) to tell your Senators and Representative to oppose funding Obama’s plan to import more jihad to America through the “refugee” resettlement program.

To find senior defense and national security officials who share his views, President-elect Trump may have to look beyond the obvious choices who, though undoubtedly talented, have a long association with the failed policies he has promised to rethink.

The Capitol Switchboard is 1-866-220-0044. We urge CHQ readers to call Congress to oppose the 21st Century Cures Act (H.R. 34) and to join other limited government constitutional conservatives in opposing this one last giveaway to Obama’s priorities by the feckless Capitol Hill Republican establishment.

House Republicans are expected to blow past a key budget deadline this week after party leaders failed to resolve a months-long fight over spending levels. Several lawmakers and aides said Tuesday the GOP was no closer to consensus on next year’s $1.04 trillion spending levels after a two-week hiatus from Capitol Hill.

Establishment Republicans, increasingly desperate to derail Trump’s candidacy, seem completely unable to understand how they have made Trump’s rise possible. To simplify it for Speaker Ryan (and Mitch McConnell and all the lobbyists on DC’s K Street) Trump is winning because he’s running against you, not Hillary Clinton; he’s running against your failure to put so much as speed bump in the road of Obama’s fundamental transformation of America.

Democrat Senator and future leader of that party in the Senate Chuck Schumer broke D.C. protocol by telling the truth about how the minority party still controls the agenda when he gloated, “Sen. [Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell wants to see the Senate work. But the good news for [Democrats] is, to make it work, he has to do basically our agenda.”

The Ryan-led House GOP has utterly betrayed the Republican base that elected them. In the recently passed budget deal, the GOP leadership saw to it — after swearing up and down that they would use their congressional posts to defund Obamacare, stop the Obama executive amnesty, and defund Planned Parenthood — broke every last promise. Once elected, the GOP Congress turned on their own supporters — deliberately, willfully, eagerly — and broke every last promise. All of them.

A vote could occur as early as Thursday after midnight, giving lawmakers and the public only one full business day to review the 2,242 page package. The Ryan-Pelosi package represents nothing short of a complete and total betrayal of the American people. By locking in the President’s refugee, immigration, and spending priorities, Ryan’s bill is designed to keep these fights out of Congress by getting them off the table for good.

Senator Jeff Sessions, leading immigration hawk, described the omnibus spending package as a “betrayal” of voters who backed Republicans in the 2014 midterms. “The voters put Republicans in a majority in the 2014 midterm elections — a vote which constituted a clear decision to reject the abuse of our immigration system. That loyalty has been repaid with betrayal.”

Republican leaders claim defeating Obama's agenda is too complicated for them to handle, but Rep. Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma has a simple solution: “It is sad that both parties in Congress are complicit in continuing to fund Planned Parenthood through last minute, massive spending bills like CRs (continuing resolutions) or omnibus bills. I have not and will not vote for any spending bill that sends one cent to Planned Parenthood.”